Animals All Around Us

Most people don’t realize there is an unseen, mysterious world all around us.

No, I’m not talking about the world of invisible scary monsters. I am talking about the world of bizarre little animals that live alongside us right in our homes. They inhabit our clothing, our furniture, our piles of old rags, our pans of dripping rainwater—even our bodies themselves.

Some of these creatures are so microscopic that you can barely even see them. Others are bigger, but you probably can’t see them without your glasses, if you wear them.

We usually don’t even notice these animals, but they’re there. Take, for instance, the little creatures that are constantly flying around our heads all day. These, it turns out, are houseflies. They can live off the scraps of food that fall from our mouths while chewing. And they are able to reproduce right in the house, in dog droppings.

Or consider an even smaller animal, which lives unnoticed among the hairs of our private regions. These are called crabs. No, don’t worry, they aren’t actual crabs. And they certainly aren’t large enough to eat, unless you could somehow get thousands of them. But they are with us, year after year.

Have you ever noticed how old chili beans and ground-up pieces of potato chips will magically seem to move around on the living-room carpet? This is actually caused by ants. Ants? Don’t they live in caves or something? That’s what I used to think. If you look closely, though, you can see them almost everywhere.

Some animals are masters of disguise. What you may think are raisins, stuck to your legs after hours of lying on the couch, are often what scientists call leeches. Where do they come from? Where don’t they come from is more like it. Most often, we pick them up wading through the basement.

Some organisms even manage to get into our appliances and live there undisturbed. These are rats. Many times, the only clue to their presence is a zapping noise, some smoke, and a smell that can linger for weeks.

Incredibly, some little animals are able to infiltrate the very liquids we drink. They are called yeast, and we consume them by the billions, hour after hour, every day.

Although some of these creatures are tiny and unobtrusive, others are not. When you get up in the middle of the night for more bites of the chicken drumstick you left on the counter, you may have to fight a raccoon for it. One reason we rarely notice these furry interlopers is that they usually live in the basement or the attic and get into the kitchen through holes in the floor or the ceiling. Also, a lot of times when we fight them we’re drunk, and later we think we imagined it.

You might suppose that at least when you climb into bed you would be free of the animal kingdom. But suppose again. There, too, they are watching us, crawling on us, waiting for the opportunity to bite. These are our cats, swarming over us throughout the night.

Through millions of years of evolution, animals have adapted to thrive in every corner of our world, from our empty Cup-a-Soup containers to the dried-up branches and dusty ornaments of our Christmas trees. They inhabit the bristles of our toothbrushes, the bristles of our whiskers, and the bristles of our other areas.

The temptation is to want to do something about them. But what? You can throw cats off the bed, but they just jump right back on. Virtually every kind of alcoholic beverage has yeast swimming in it. You can scrub the crabs off your body, but what are you going to do about your bedsheets, or your sweatpants? Wash them, too? You could drive yourself crazy.

It’s true that some of these invaders can be harmful. One animal in particular can literally eat its way through the wood that holds the house together. This is the common beaver. He is attracted to the water overflowing from our basements, which he tries to dam up. Another harmful pest is the moth, which can eat holes in your clothing and fly in your mouth when you’re taking a nap.

But many of the creatures living in our homes can be beneficial. Take drifters, for example. Sometimes they will go to the store to get you things (although they usually “lose” the change). Termites will often leave piles of sawdust around, which can be used to soak up stains. And mice entertain us by playing musical instruments. No, wait, I’m thinking of cartoon mice.

Even if we could get rid of all these animals with a magic wand, would we want to? Yes, of course we would—why would you even ask that? Maybe the best answer, as with most things, is just to do nothing at all.

However, that’s not what the health department thinks. They have hit me with a large fine and ordered me to “clean up” my property. Ultimately, though, we have to ask ourselves: Do we want to live in some soulless antiseptic world ruled by futuristic robots, where dishes are cleaned every day and sinks and toilets are an eerie, gleaming white? I don’t think that we do. I think people would rather live in homes where animals roam wild and free, in our hair, in our bags of things, and in our underpants. ♦

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